In an age when many of us could hardly make our way to an unfamiliar grocery store without relying on a GPS navigation system, we might well wonder how the Romans could establish and sustain their mighty empire without so much as a proper map. That’s the question addressed by the Historia Militumvideo above, “How Did Ancient People Travel Without Maps?” Or more to the point, how did they travel without scaled maps — that is, ones “in which the map’s distances were proportional to their actual size in the real world,” like almost all those we consult on our screens today?
The surviving maps from the ancient Roman world tend not to take great pains adhering to true geography. Yet as the Roman Empire expanded, laying roads across three continents, more and more Romans engaged in long-distance travel, and for the most part seem to have arrived at their intended destinations.
To do so, they used not maps per se but “itineraries,” which textually listed towns and cities along the way and the distance between them. By the fourth century, “all main Roman roads along with 225 stopping stations were compiled in a document called the Itinerarium Antonini, the Itinerary of Emperor Antonius Pius.”
This highly practical document includes mostly roads that “passed through large cities, which provided better facilities for housing, shopping, bathing, and other traveler needs.” With this information, “a traveler could copy the specific distances and stations they needed to reach their destination.” Still today, some seventeen centuries later, “most people wouldn’t use a paper scaled map for travel, but would instead break their journey down into a list of subway stations, bus stops, and intersections.” And if you were to attempt to drive across Europe, making a modern-day Roman Empire road trip, you’d almost certainly rely on the distances and points of interest provided by the synthesized voice reading aloud from the vast Itinerarium Antonini of the twenty-first century.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Charles Mingus, the innovative jazz musician, was known for having a bad temper. He once got so irritated with a heckler that he ended up trashing his $20,000 bass. Another time, when a pianist didn’t get things right, Mingus reached right inside the piano and ripped the strings out with his bare hands — a true story mentioned in the BBC documentary, 1959: The Year that Changed Jazz.
But Mingus had a softer, nurturing side too. If you head to the official Charles Mingus website, you will find a copy of the Charles Mingus Cat Toilet Training Program, a loving little guide created for cat owners everywhere. The trick to potty training your cat comes down to edging the litter box closer to the bathroom, eventually placing the box on the potty, and then cutting a hole in the center of the box. Expect to spend about three weeks making the transition. And who knows, Mingus says, your cat may even learn to flush. The full guide appears here. Or read it below:
1
First, you must train your cat to use a home-made cardboard litter box, if you have not already done so. (If your box does not have a one-piece bottom, add a cardboard that fits inside, so you have a false bottom that is smooth and strong. This way the box will not become soggy and fall out at the bottom. The grocery store will have extra flat cardboards which you can cut down to fit exactly inside your box.)
Be sure to use torn up newspaper, not kitty litter. Stop using kitty litter. (When the time comes you cannot put sand in a toilet.)
Once your cat is trained to use a cardboard box, start moving the box around the room, towards the bathroom. If the box is in a corner, move it a few feet from the corner, but not very noticeably. If you move it too far, he may go to the bathroom in the original corner. Do it gradually. You’ve got to get him thinking. Then he will gradually follow the box as you move it to the bathroom. (Important: if you already have it there, move it out of the bathroom, around, and then back. He has to learn to follow it. If it is too close to the toilet, to begin with, he will not follow it up onto the toilet seat when you move it there.) A cat will look for his box. He smells it.
2
Now, as you move the box, also start cutting the brim of the box down, so the sides get lower. Do this gradually.
Finally, you reach the bathroom and, eventually, the toilet itself. Then, one day, prepare to put the box on top of the toilet. At each corner of the box, cut a little slash. You can run string around the box, through these slashes, and tie the box down to the toilet so it will not fall off. Your cat will see it there and jump up to the box, which is now sitting on top of the toilet (with the sides cut down to only an inch or so.)
Don’t bug the cat now, don’t rush him, because you might throw him off. Just let him relax and go there for awhile-maybe a week or two. Meanwhile, put less and less newspaper inside the box.
3
One day, cut a small hole in the very center of his box, less than an apple-about the size of a plum-and leave some paper in the box around the hole. Right away he will start aiming for the hole and possibly even try to make it bigger. Leave the paper for awhile to absorb the waste. When he jumps up he will not be afraid of the hole because he expects it. At this point you will realize that you have won. The most difficult part is over.
From now on, it is just a matter of time. In fact, once when I was cleaning the box and had removed it from the toilet, my cat jumped up anyway and almost fell in. To avoid this, have a temporary flat cardboard ready with a little hole, and slide it under the toilet lid so he can use it while you are cleaning, in case he wants to come and go, and so he will not fall in and be scared off completely. You might add some newspaper up there too, while you are cleaning, in case your cat is not as smart as Nightlife was.
4
Now cut the box down completely until there is no brim left. Put the flat cardboard, which is left, under the lid of the toilet seat, and pray. Leave a little newspaper, still. He will rake it into the hole anyway, after he goes to the bathroom. Eventually, you can simply get rid of the cardboard altogether. You will see when he has got his balance properly.
Don’t be surprised if you hear the toilet flush in the middle of the night. A cat can learn how to do it, spurred on by his instinct to cover up. His main thing is to cover up. If he hits the flush knob accidentally and sees that it cleans the bowl inside, he may remember and do it intentionally.
Also, be sure to turn the toilet paper roll around so that it won’t roll down easily if the cat paws it. The cat is apt to roll it into the toilet, again with the intention of covering up- the way he would if there were still kitty litter.
It took me about three or four weeks to toilet train my cat, Nightlife. Most of the time is spent moving the box very gradually to the bathroom. Do it very slowly and don’t confuse him. And, remember, once the box is on the toilet, leave it a week or even two. The main thing to remember is not to rush or confuse him.
Bonus: Below you can hear The Wire’s Reg E. Cathey read “The Charles Mingus CAT-alog for Toilet Training Your Cat.”
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In 2023, Google launched several online certificate programs designed to help students land an entry-level job, without necessarily having a college degree. This includes a certificate program focused on Cybersecurity, a field that stands poised to grow as companies become more digital and face mounting cyberattacks.
Understand the importance of cybersecurity practices and their impact for organizations.
Identify common risks, threats, and vulnerabilities, as well as techniques to mitigate them.
Protect networks, devices, people, and data from unauthorized access and cyberattacks using Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools.
Gain hands-on experience with Python, Linux, and SQL.
The Cybersecurity Professional Certificate also now includes six new videos that explain how to use AI in cybersecurity. The videos cover everything from using artificial intelligence to help identify bugs and system vulnerabilities, to refining code and prioritizing alerts with AI.
Students can take individual courses in these professional certificate programs for free. (Above, you can watch a video from the first course in the cybersecurity certificate program, entitled “Foundations of Cybersecurity.”) However, if you would like to receive a certificate, Coursera will charge $49 per month (after an initial 7‑day free trial period). That means that the Cybersecurity Professional Certificate, designed to be completed in 6 months, will cost roughly $300 in total.
Once students complete the cybersecurity certificate, they can add the credential to their LinkedIn profile, resume, or CV. As a perk, students in the U.S. can also connect with 150+employers (e.g., American Express, Colgate-Palmolive, T‑Mobile, Walmart, and Google) who have pledged to consider certificate holders for open positions. According to Coursera, this certificate can prepare students to become an entry-level “cybersecurity analyst and SOC (security operations center) analyst.”
You can start a 7‑day free trial of the Cybersecurity Professional Certificatehere. Alternatively, if you sign up for Coursera Plus, whose price has been reduced by 40% until December 2, 2024, you can enroll in the cybersecurity certificate program at no charge. Find out more here.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
Whatever set of religious or cultural traditions you come from, you’ve probably seen a Celtic cross before. Unlike a conventional cross, it has a circular ring, or “nimbus,” where its arms and stem intersect. The sole addition of that element gives it a highly distinctive look, and indeed makes it one of the representative examples of Insular iconography — that is, iconography created within Great Britain and Ireland in the time after the Roman Empire. Perhaps the most artistically impressive Celtic cross in existence is found on one of the pages of the ninth-century Book of Kells (view online here), which itself stands as the most celebrated of all Insular illuminated manuscripts.
On what’s called the “carpet page” of the Book of Kells, explains Smarthistory’s Steven Zucker in the video above, “we see a cross so elaborate that it almost ceases to be a cross.” It has “two crossbeams, and these delicate circles with intricate interlacing in each of them, but the circles are so large that they almost overwhelm the cross itself.”
That’s hardly the only image of note in the book, which contains the four Gospels of the New Testament, among other texts, as well as numerous and extravagant illustrations, all of them executed painstakingly by hand on its vellum pages back when it was created, circa 800, in the scriptorium of a medieval monastery. These illustrations include, as Zucker’s colleague Lauren Kilroy puts it, “the earliest representation of the Virgin and Child in a manuscript in Western Europe.”
This is hardly a volume one approaches lightly — especially if one approaches it in person, as Zucker and Kilroy did on their visit to Trinity College Dublin. “When we were standing in front of the book,” says Kilroy, they “noticed how many folios formed the book itself” (which would have required the skin of more than 100 young calves). Coming to grips with the sheer quantity of material in the Book of Kells is one thing, but understanding how to interpret it is another still. Hence the free online course previously featured here on Open Culture, which can help you more fully appreciate the book in its digitized form available online. Even if the cross, Celtic or otherwise, stirs no particular religious feelings within you, the Book of Kells has much to say about the civilization that produced it: a civilization that, insular though it may once have been, would go on to change the shape of the world.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
I’ve always admired people who can successfully navigate what I refer to as “Kafka’s Castle,” a term of dread for the many government and corporate agencies that have an inordinate amount of power over our permanent records, and that seem as inscrutable and chillingly absurd as the labyrinth the character K navigates in Kafka’s last allegorical novel. Even if you haven’t read The Castle, if you work for such an entity—or like all of us have regular dealings with the IRS, the healthcare and banking system, etc.—you’re well aware of the devilish incompetence that masquerades as due diligence and ties us all in knots. Why do multi-million and billion dollar agencies seem unable, or unwilling, to accomplish the simplest of tasks? Why do so many of us spend our lives in the real-life bureaucratic nightmares satirized in The Office and Office Space?
One answer comes via Laurence J. Peter’s 1969 satire The Peter Principle—which offers the theory that managers and executives get promoted to the level of their incompetence—then, David Brent-like, go on to ruin their respective departments. The Harvard Business Review summed up disturbing recent research confirming and supplementing Peter’s insights into the narcissism, overconfidence, or actual sociopathy of many a government and business leader. But in addition to human failings, there’s another possible reason for bureaucratic disorder; the conspiracy-minded among us may be forgiven for assuming that in many cases, institutional incompetence is the result of deliberate sabotage from both above and below. The ridiculous inner workings of most organizations certainly make a lot more sense when viewed in the light of one set of instructions for “purposeful stupidity,” namely the once top-secret Simple Sabotage Field Manual, written in 1944 by the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
Now declassified and freely available on the CIA website, the manual that the agency describes as “surprisingly relevant” was once distributed to OSS officers abroad to assist them in training “citizen-saboteurs” in occupied countries like Norway and France. Such people, writes Rebecca Onion at Slate, “might already be sabotaging materials, machinery, or operations of their own initiative,” but may have lacked the devious talent for sowing chaos that only an intelligence agency can properly master. Genuine laziness, arrogance, and mindlessness may surely be endemic. But the Field Manual asserts that “purposeful stupidity is contrary to human nature” and requires a particular set of skills. The citizen-saboteur “frequently needs pressure, stimulation or assurance, and information and suggestions regarding feasible methods of simple sabotage.”
You can read the full document here. Or find an easy-to-read version on Project Gutenberg here. To get a sense of just how “timeless”—according to the CIA itself—such instructions remain, see the abridged list below, courtesy of Business Insider. You will laugh ruefully, then maybe shudder a little as you recognize how much your own workplace, and many others, resemble the kind of dysfunctional mess the OSS meticulously planned during World War II.
Organizations and Conferences
Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.
When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committee as large as possible — never less than five.
Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
Managers
In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers.
Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw.
To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions.
Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.
Employees
Work slowly
Work slowly.
Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can.
Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right.
Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.
Note: This post originally appeared on our site in December 2015.
In the trailer below for the world’s first 3D replica of St. Peter’s Basilica, Yves Ubelmann speaks of using “AI for Good,” which isn’t just an ideal, but also the name of a lab at Microsoft. Microsoft and Ubelman’s digital-preservation company Iconem were two of the participants in that ambitious project, along with the Vatican itself. Pope Francis, writes AP’s Nicole Winfield, “has called for the ethical use of AI and used his annual World Message of Peace this year to urge an international treaty to regulate it, arguing that technology lacking human values of compassion, mercy, morality and forgiveness were too great.”
What better show of good faith in the technology than to allow AI to be used to bring the center of the faith Pope Francis represents to the world? In the nearly 400 years since its completion, of course, the world has always come to the current St. Peter’s Basilica, and will continue to do so.
The 3D-replica project “has been launched ahead of the Vatican’s 2025 Jubilee, a holy year in which more than 30 million pilgrims are expected to pass through the basilica’s Holy Door, on top of the 50,000 who visit on a normal day,” Winfield writes. But no matter where in the world you happen to be, you can virtually enter St. Peter’s Basilica right now, and spend as long as you like, admiring the basilica itself, the cupola, Bernini’s St. Peter’s Baldachin, and Michelangelo’s Pietà, among other features.
However important (and attention-drawing) artificial intelligence was as a tool in the creation of this ultra-precise “digital twin” of St. Peter’s Basilica, the four-week process of capturing every detail of the real structure that could be captured also necessitated the use of drones, lasers, and cameras taking more than 400,000 digital photos. The “AI for Good Lab contributed advanced tools that refined the digital twin with millimeter-level accuracy, and used AI to help detect and map structural vulnerabilities like cracks and missing mosaic tiles,” says Microsoft’s site. “The Vatican oversaw the collaboration, ensuring the preservation of the Basilica as a cultural, spiritual, and historically significant site for years to come.”
It makes a certain sense to apply the highest technology of our time for the benefit of a building known as the greatest architectural marvel of its time. But in order to better appreciate the kind of knowledge that will be revealed by the 22 petabytes of information that went into the digital model (which offers its own guided tour) we’d do well to immerse ourselves first in what was already known about St. Peter’s Basilica. For a brief introduction to the conception and evolution of this grand church as it stands today, we could do much worse than architecture-and-history YouTuber Manuel Bravo’s video “St Peter’s Basilica Explained.” If you watch it, don’t be surprised if you find yourself tempted to engage in prolonged exploration of the model — or indeed, to book a visit to the real thing. Enter the digital St. Peter’s here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
114 years ago today (November 20, 1910), Leo Tolstoy—the author who gave us two major Russian classics Anna Karenina and War & Peace—died at Astapovo, a small, remote train station in the heart of Russia. Pneumonia was the official cause. His death came just weeks after Tolstoy, then 82 years old, made a rather dramatic decision. He left his wife, his comfortable estate, and his wealth, then traveled 26 hours to Sharmardino, where Tolstoy’s sister Marya lived, and where he planned to spend the remainder of his life in a small, rented hut. (Elif Batuman has more on this.) But then he pushed on, boarding a train to the Caucasus. And it proved to be more than his already weakened constitution could handle. Rather amazingly, the footage above brings you back to Tolstoy’s final days, and right to his deathbed itself. This clip comes from a 1969 BBC series Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark, and these days you can still find copies of Clark’s accompanying book kicking around online.
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Pierre-Joseph Redouté made his name by painting flowers, an achievement impossible without a meticulousness that exceeds all bounds of normality. He published his three-volume collection Les Roses and his eight-volume collection Les Liliacées between 1802 and 1824, and a glance at their pages today vividly suggests the painstaking nature of both his process for not just rendering those flowers, but also for seeing them properly in the first place. While Redouté’s works have long been available free online, the digital forms in which they’ve been available haven’t quite done them justice — certainly not to the mind of designer and data artist Nicholas Rougeux.
Hence Rougeux’s decision to undertake a restoration of Les Roses and Les Liliacées, an “opportunity to become intimately familiar with his techniques and develop a deeper appreciation for his efforts.” The project ended up demanding eleven months, only some of which were taken up by bringing the original colors back to Redouté’s paintings, which “not only depict the physical characteristics of the roses but also convey their delicate beauty and fragrance.” Rougeux also had to digitally re-create the reading experience of these books for the internet, custom-designing a digital gallery for viewing their roses and lilies as they pop out against their newly added dark backgrounds.
Placing all of Redouté’s flowers against those backgrounds entailed the real Photoshop labor, taking each image and “making the layer mask manually by carefully and slowly tracing along every edge” — for all 655 plates of Les Roses and Les Liliacées, as Rougeux writes in a detailed making-of blog post. “No matter the complexity, I traced every flower, every leaf, every stem, every root, and every hair to preserve all the details and ensure that Redouté’s hard work looked as good on a dark background as it did on a light one.” Translating art from one medium to another can be a supremely effective way to cultivate a full appreciation of the artist’s skill — and in this case, a no less full appreciation of his patience. See the online restoration of Les Roses et Les Liliacées here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In April, 1983, 50 million television viewers watched the illusionist David Copperfield make the Statue of Liberty disappear, straight into thin air. If you’re north of 50, you perhaps remember the spectacle. How did he do it? 40 years later, the YouTube channel Mind Blown Magic Illusion demystifies the large-scale magic trick, explaining how Copperfield distracted the audience, rotated the stage, and shifted Lady Liberty out of view. That’s apparently the gist of the illusion. However, in the comments section on YouTube, one commenter adds a little more important detail:
You missed the most important misdirection. He had a helicopter with a bright spotlight shining on the statue for a considerable length of time during which he apologized to the audience and said they were having “technical problems.” Eventually the curtain came across and the stage began to revolve imperceptibly slowly. However the helicopter moved in sync with the stage. The beam of light appeared to be stationary in relation to the stage. When the curtain was lifted they saw the helicopter in the same place but with no statue. The beam of light also helped black out the background. Otherwise the audience would have seen a different skyline. Pure genius!
For Open Culture readers, it’s worth mentioning that the legendary filmmaker Frank Capra (It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, It Happened One Night) played an unlikely role in the production. In an interview with Judd Apatow, Copperfield recalls how he enlisted Capra to help write the script for the episode:
So then I said [to myself] “Now the Statue of Liberty is going to disappear, but I’ve got to make this have more meaning.” So I went to visit Frank Capra, one of my idols, and did a kind of Judd Apatow interview with him. I said, “I’d like the Statue of Liberty to disappear, but I want to do it as a lesson in freedom, how valuable freedom is and what the world would be like without liberty.” And Frank Capra looked at me and said, “David, I love your idea, but here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to try and it’s not going to work; it’s not going to disappear.” And I said, “Mr. Capra, I can’t do that.” You know? [laughs] And I got to watch Frank Capra, in his eighties, in action.
You can watch some of the original 1983 footage below. Enjoy!
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There’s an eXodus taking place, and millions are finding a new home on Bluesky. In recent days, the decentralized social media platform has been gaining 10,000 new users every 10–15 minutes, or about 1 million new users per day. Open Culture is already there, sharing the cultural posts you once enjoyed on Twitter. We hope you will join us. Find us at @openculture.bsky.social, or just clickhere.
Bertrand Russell may have lived his long life concerned with big topics in logic, mathematics, politics, and society, but that didn’t keep him from thinking seriously about how to handle his own day-to-day relationships. That hardly means he handled every such relationship with perfect aplomb: take note of his three divorces, the first of which was formalized in 1921, the year he married his lover Dora Black. Possessed of similar bohemian-reformer ideals — and, before long, two children — the couple founded the experimental Beacon Hill School in 1927, intent on encouraging their young pupils’ development as not just thinkers-in-training but full human beings.
A few years later, Russell published his personal “ten commandments” in a culture magazine called Everyman, and you can read it in full in this 1978 issue of the Russell Society News. (Go to page 5.)
“Everybody, I suppose, has his own list of virtues that he tries to practice, and, when he fails to practice them, he feels shame quite independently of the opinion of others, so far at any rate as conscious thought is concerned,” he writes by way of introduction. “I have tried to put the virtues that I should wish to possess into the form of a decalogue,” which is as follows:
Do not lie to yourself.
Do not lie to other people unless they are exercising tyranny.
When you think it is your duty to inflict pain, scrutinize your reasons closely.
When you desire power, examine yourself closely as to why you deserve it.
When you have power, use it to build up people, not to constrict them.
Do not attempt to live without vanity, since this is impossible, but choose the right audience from which to seek admiration.
Do not think of yourself as a wholly self-contained unit.
Be reliable.
Be just.
Be good-natured.
In the full text, Russell elaborates on the thinking behind each of these virtues. “When you wish to believe some theological or political doctrine which will increase your income, you will, if you are not very careful, give much more weight to the arguments in favor than to those against”: hence the importance of not lying to yourself. When it comes to lying to others, not only should governments tell the truth to their subjects, “parents should tell the truth to their children, however inconvenient this may seem.” And families as in states, “those who are intelligent but weak cannot be expected to forego the use of their intelligence in their conflicts with those who are stupid but strong.”
Russell’s fifth commandment also applies to relationships between the old and the young, since “those who deal with the young inevitably have power, and it is easy to exercise this power in ways pleasing to the educator rather than useful to the child.” And by his eighth commandment, he means “to suggest a whole set of humdrum but necessary virtues, such as punctuality, keeping promises, adhering to plans involving other people, refraining from treachery even in its mildest forms.” Alas, “modern education, in lessening the emphasis on discipline, has, I think, failed to produce reliable human beings where social obligations are concerned.”
This “prescriptive emphasis — notably the stress placed on the merits of some humble virtues — may have been influenced then by his practical experience of progressive education,” writes The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell editor Andrew Bone. But Russell still revised his decalogue long after he left the Beacon Hill School in 1932, with world events of the subsequent decades inspiring him to use it in the service of what he regarded as a liberal worldview. One version broadcast on the BBC in 1951 includes such commandments as “Do not feel absolutely certain of anything,” “Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than passive agreement,” and “Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you” — all of which more of the last few generations of students could have done well to internalize.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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